Later, after she was gone, he looked through some of his copybooks into which, when he woke at night, he had been writing notes. It was nearly impossible to read them. Now in the office with the desk and the swivel chair he started to write again, but his hand refused to move. He could write down the hairdresser’s words but not his own. The struggle was enormous to pen one word. And one word seemed to contain such a myriad of meanings that it was impossible to complete even a sentence.

He sat immobile in front of the desk. His mind was trying to make a leap into the dark but his hands would not comply. His thumb and forefinger were numb. If he tried to write they froze. And inside his head language no longer arrived grammatically, but surfaced as a series of bizarre signs. He walked out into the lounge. A nurse was standing by the window. He told her what had happened.

“I’ll write it down for you,” she said.

He was overwhelmed with gratitude.

And so his day began with a visit to the maternity ward, followed by a session with the hairdresser when she would tell him her story, and then for an hour he would dictate his confession to the nurse. At first all that emerged was a mix of blame, distress and hurt. The nurse quietly wrote down what he had to say. Sometimes the door opened and one of the patients would look in, glance around slowly at the two of them and then go away.

She’d ask him to spell certain words, she’d wait, he’d keep his eyes away from her, he’d turn and start again.